Chapter 23: A Spiritual Attitude Towards Things

Dispassion has been regarded as an indispensable prerequisite of yoga. A
spirit of renunciation and a feeling of a final worthlessness of all things may
sometimes take possession of us either due to our understanding by a careful
observation of the nature of things, or by a sudden kick that we receive from
nature. Either way, a spirit of renunciation can arise in our minds.

Very intelligent, scientific analysis will reveal that there is something
wrong with the world, and it is not as it appears on the surface. Also, when
there is a catastrophe and a loss of everything that one holds as dear and
worthwhile in life, then also there is a feeling that everything is useless.
Something becomes useless only in comparison with something else which we
regard as useful. There cannot be a total uselessness of everything, because
such a feeling is comparative.

Whatever be the nature of the renunciation which takes possession of us,
yoga insists that it should be positive; and the idea of positivity is that it
should not be capable of reversion into the old groove of thinking. If there is
a catastrophic revolution and a loss of everything material, there can be a
sudden urge for religious devotions. This urge cannot be regarded as a positive
aspiration, because it can cease to operate later on when conditions favourable
for a comfortable life are provided. When those things, the loss of which
became the cause of a spirit of renunciation within, come back to us after some
time, the renunciation which was the effect thereof may come to an end, and
therefore, that is not a genuine spirit of renunciation.

There are, as it is said, three kinds of dispassion. There is the disgust
that we feel for everything when a dead man is cremated. We feel that it is
something horrible that a man has gone like that suddenly, and we do not know
where he has gone. He has gone to the winds, most unexpectedly. He is cremated,
buried, thrown away, cast aside as if he is nothing. We think, “What a pity!
This is life. This may be my fate too.” This kind of feeling is a sort of vairagya arising in the mind when it sees such things. It
is called smasana vairagya.
Smasana means cremation ground. When we see a
cremation ground, we feel a sense of disgust. But when we come back to our
house, fifty percent of that feeling goes. We have
forgotten what we have seen in the cremation ground; the ashes and the flames
are out of sight, and we are once again in a cosy homely atmosphere which tells
us, “My dear friend, after all, things are not so bad.” After few days the smasana vairagya has gone and we
are once again in the same old pleasurable, comfortable, happy way of thinking.
This is not vairagya; this is not dispassion. It is
not spiritual, and it is not going to help us in the practice of yoga.

Another kind of dispassion is called abhava vairagya. Because we cannot get a thing, we have a
dispassion for it. If we are on Mount Everest, we may not get milk, so we say,
“Well, I don’t take milk.” This is a great renunciation indeed when it is
because we cannot get it! But when we can get it, naturally we will want it.
Therefore, this is also not positive, not spiritual, and it cannot be called
renunciation, dispassion, or vairagya. It is abhava vairagya.

The third kind is called prasava vairagya. A woman feels disgust when she bears a child.
“Oh, what a horror it is!” Life itself is meaningless for her due to the agony
of the travail, and she makes up her mind that such a sorry state of affairs
may not be repeated. But it is temporary, like the other vairagyas,
because when the pain goes, the idea that there has been pain also goes, and
once again the mind gets into the earlier ways of thinking of those conditions
of life which provide the usual comforts, pleasures, etc.

These are all quite different from what yoga requires of us. Dispassion,
which is the great requisite of yoga, is not any one of these, but something
different altogether. Dṛṣṭa anuśravika viṣaya vitṛṣṇasya vaśīkārasaṁjña vairāgyam (Y.S. 1.15), says Patanjali in his
famous aphorism. Vairagya is not abhavavairagya, smasana vairagya or prasava vairagya. What is it that we are required to practise and
make our own? It is an entirely spiritual attitude towards things. Vitrishna is the word used in this aphorism. Trishna is craving, a lust for pleasure, a hunger for
satisfaction, a thirst that we feel inside due to the lack of comfortable
objects. The object itself is not of primary importance here; the attitude
towards the object is of greater importance. The greed for gold may be present
in the mind of a thief or a miser, but a child has no greed for gold even if it
sees a gold ornament, because it cannot perceive the value of gold. Gold is
gold whether it is in the presence of a child, a monkey, a miser or a thief. It
is the same object; it has not changed its character, and its value is the
same. The value of the gold is not diminished merely because it is placed in
front of a baby, but the attitude of a baby towards it is different from that
of a miser, a thief, and so on.

While the nature of the object exerts an influence upon the mind, no doubt,
and it is necessary that we are free from atmospheres which are infested with
such objects of attraction, it is more important to remember that yoga is an
internal adjustment with the existing condition of things. Yoga does not aim at
transformation of the world, because such a thing is not necessary. What is
necessary is a self-adjustment with the order of things. In a famous mantra of
the Isavasya Upanishad it is said, yāthātathyato’rthān vyadadhāc chāśvatībhyas samābhyaḥ (Isa Up.
8): The great wisdom of the Creator projected the universe in the manner in
which it ought to be, and it does not need a modification or an amendment of
the act. The act of God is not subject to amendment. It has been very wisely
constituted by Him, and it is futile on the part of any human being or group of
people to think that the acts of God can be amended by our little efforts. He
has permanently fixed the order of things, and if we accept the wisdom of God,
we have also to accept the correctness of this order with which He has
manifested this universe.

So, what is wrong with the world then, about which we are so much
complaining? What is wrong is that we are not able to recognise this order that
is present in things. The order is trans-empirical; it is beyond the perception
of the senses. The organisation of the universe instituted by God is not
capable of human understanding and, therefore, we misconstrue the whole order
and imagine that there is chaos, that God has created confusion and a
tremendous ugliness, a resource of evil, pain, suffering, and everything that
is unwanted. This is all the wisdom of God; He could not find anything better.
We are complaining against the very discomfiture of God that is unwarrantedly
imagined by us. But the Upanishad has proclaimed that everything is perfectly
in order and our like or dislike for a thing does not affect the thing very
seriously, but it affects us.

To reiterate, yoga aims at an individual transformation necessary for an adjustment with the cosmic
order of things. The cosmic order will not change. The cosmos is the body of
the Virat, as the Vedanta tells us, and there is no
need for a change in it. But there is a need for change somewhere else, in what
is called jiva srishti, not
in Ishvara srishti. These
are all technical jargons of Vedanta. The meaning is that the creation of God
needs no change, but the creation of the individual needs change. The creation
of God does not need change because God is omniscient, and He has wisely
construed everything in the manner it ought to be. He has placed everything in the
very place where it ought to be, in the condition in which it has to be; but
the individual cannot comprehend this mystery because no individual can be
omniscient, and no one who is not omniscient can understand the perfection of
God’s creation.

If the ugliness, the stupidity and the evil of this world are really there
as we imagine it, it should be there always. But we have the epic illustration
of the Viratsvarupa, for example, described in the
Bhagavadgita, and no ugliness was seen when the Virat
was manifest. Arjuna could not see dung or drains and
sewage. Where had it gone? Had it vanished altogether? All this stupidity of
the world is not there in that perfection, but that perfection is inclusive of
this stupidity, this ugliness. It is not somewhere far away. What Arjuna was made to visualise was the very same thing that
we are seeing with our eyes. He was not seeing something else, far off in the
distant heavens. The same drains and dustbins that we detest so much were
there; but they were not dustbins. They were something else, because they were
arranged in the pattern of universal perfection which could be seen with a new
eye altogether, not with the fleshy eyes. The eye of perfection saw only
perfection. But if this stupidity of the world is really there, then even after
we reach God, we will still see that horror. Then there will be no point in
practising yoga or even in God-realisation, because the horror will continue
for all time. The point is that this is a mistake in perception.

Thus vairagya, or dispassion, is a tendency of the
mind to adjust itself with the natural order of things, and when this attitude
is appreciably effected, there is also a simultaneous
feeling of mental health, which is the proper attitude towards things. An
improper attitude is mental illness. Love and hatred are illnesses of the mind.
We are very fond of the word ‘love’. We think it is a great, gorgeous, divine
blessing upon us, but it is not so. It is also an affection of the mind because
where there is no object, there can be no love; and as we are again and again
told that objects do not really exist as they appear to our senses, then love
also cannot exist in the way in which it is manifest because what is love, if
there is no object of love? All emotional movements, whether in the form of
like or dislike, cease on account of a self-completion and a
self-sufficiency felt within by a manifestation of spiritual awareness.
This is the vitrishna which Patanjali
speaks of. We have no desire for things because we have now understood things
in a better way.

Why we do not have a desire for things is a very vast subject for us to
contemplate. Why is it that there should be no desire for objects? Why are we
so much condemning desire for objects? What is wrong if we desire things? What
is the precise mistake that we are committing in loving things, hating things,
or desiring things in this way or that way? What is the matter? The matter is
simple. It is against the constitution of things. It is unscientific because
the order of things, the nature of the universe as it is, is such that
everything is arranged in an organic connectedness. This system is called the Virat. When an organic connectedness of things becomes the
content of consciousness, this is the experience of the Virat.
What do we mean by this connectedness? It is a realisation that there cannot be
objects and, therefore, there cannot be subjects. There cannot be causes and,
therefore, there cannot be effects, and vice versa. In a mutual interrelation
of things, we cannot say which is the cause and which
is the effect, which is the object and which is the subject, who is the lover
and who is the loved. We cannot say anything. The idea of externality,
isolation, separatedness is the cause of attachment,
which is the principle of desire, passion, etc.; and inasmuch as any desire for
a thing is an affirmation of there being no such organic connectedness among
things, desire is contrary to Truth and, therefore, it is not desirable. Desire
itself is not desirable.

We should develop an inward feeling of ‘enough with things’. A sense of
enough, of satiety, should arise in us, not because we do not have things, not
because we cannot get things, not because there is a threat from outside, but
because we ourselves do not feel a need for things; we have enough of things.
Either we have enough of everything, or we have seen that desire itself is not
a proper attitude or a correct form of understanding. In such works as the Panchadasi, the famous Vedanta text, we are told that a
great sage, a man of wisdom, feels that he has no desire. An emperor who has
the whole earth under his control also may have no desire. The emperor has no
desire because there is nothing to desire. When the whole earth is his, what is
he going to desire? Whatever he wants is under his control. The sage, the jnanin, also has no desire, but for a different reason
altogether. Both the emperor and the sage have satiety, surfeit, a feeling of
‘enough with things’, though for different reasons. The point made out in this
analogy is that, rightly or wrongly, we cannot have freedom from desires as
long as there are covetable objects in the world, whether we can actually
possess them or not. The covetable objects should not be there at all.

But they are there, so what are we going to do with them? The objects should
either be wholly possessed by us, as is the case with an emperor ruling the
whole earth, or they have to become part of our own nature, as is the case with
a sage of wisdom. Otherwise, we cannot be free from desires.

Dispassion can also be caused by a scientific, logical investigation
conducted into the nature of things as, for example, a physicist would do
through a microscope. “This is a lump of gold. Very beautiful! I would like to
have it. Let me observe it properly through a microscope.” He goes on observing
it, but he cannot see gold when he sees it through a microscope. He finds that
whatever is inside the stone is also inside the gold, and it appears to be gold
because of a rearrangement of the very same constituents which form the object
called stone.

In the Panchadasi, we have very detailed
expositions. Towards the end of the Sixth Chapter the great author says that
various causes of vairagya are there, but whatever be
the cause or the reason behind the rise of vairagya,
it should be spiritually oriented—which means to say, there should not be a
necessity to retrace our steps. Many honest and sincere seekers on the path of
yoga fail in their attempts on account of a misjudgment
of themselves. While we are very shrewd in judging others, we are not so clever
in judging our own selves. We are very lenient towards ourselves, and very hard
upon others, which is very unfortunate. The point is, we have to be hard on
ourselves and a little lenient on others, but we are not. The yogi is very
severe upon himself, though he may be very kind towards others. He may be very
charitable towards other people, but not so charitable towards himself. Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a great
example of this. “Give, give, give, and it shall be given” was his philosophy,
as was the case with Jesus Christ. In my life, at least, I have seen only one
person who was a follower of the philosophy of giving, and it was Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. I have never
seen any other mahatma or a saint of this type, someone who would give things
and feel that he loses nothing by giving. There is always a fear that by
giving, we lose. “If I give five dollars, I have lost five dollars.” That is
not so, my dear friend. We do not lose, we gain something. What we do not know
is that when there is an apparent debit of five dollars here, there is a credit
of five thousand dollars somewhere else—in another, superior bank altogether,
in which we have an account. Man, with his foolish, stupid brain, cannot understand
this.

“Give, give, give, and it shall be given unto you, pressed and overflowing.”
What is the meaning of this? The meaning is that man’s understanding is
inadequate to the task. Man is born and brought up in a set of conditions which
insist on selfishness of behaviour and comfort of the body, glory, name, fame,
power, authority, and whatnot. All these are the doom of yoga. The greater we
ascend on the ladder of yoga, the smaller we look in the eyes of people, and
finally we may look like nobody at all when we are a master. But nobody wishes
to be looked upon as a small fry by people.

Thus, the ethics of yoga and the psychology of yoga are something
super-natural, super-mundane; and the demands of yoga practice, therefore, also
seem to be very exacting. When one steps onto the ladder of yoga, one will be
repelled by its requisitions—not because it is really hard or exacting, but
because it is unintelligible to the uninitiated mind. Therefore, to live with a
Guru for a sufficient length of time, until one is well grounded
in an understanding of what is one’s true aim in life,
is called for.